Whisperin’ Bill Anderson

Radio Days

Transcript from "Radio Days"

What…we talked a little bit about your sports writing and then we talked about…we’ve not talked about DJ days. Just briefly about WGAU, and my understanding was Mr. Holder suggested you might want to look elsewhere. Is that right?

(Laughs) I went all over north Georgia the summer after my freshman year trying to find me a job at a radio station. I drove…I had a little ’47 Ford that you’ve talked about. I drove it to…gosh…to Winder, to Monroe, to Griffin, to LaGrange, to Newnan, to Carrollton. I remember all of these places I went in and…and the whole thing…and…and this is so true in…in broadcasting, or it was then, because we didn’t really have all that experience that you can get here at the school now, but it was always, well do you have any experience? Well, no. Well, go get some experience and then you can get a job. Well, how you gonna get experience if you can’t get a job and it just becomes this chicken and egg thing. So I was turned down in all of these places, came back to Athens of all places, and a man I mentioned a while ago named Burl Womack was managing WGAU and he hired me to do some radio work, trained me, taught me. I’d been working there 6 weeks when Randolph Holder and Tom Lloyd bought the station and I figured well, I’m…I’m back out on the street again. But Mr. Holder was very nice. He kept me on. I stayed there for several months. He made it very clear that there was not going to be any country music played on his station and (laughs)…a strange sequence of events one Saturday night. I was doing exactly what I was told to do but it ended up that I put some country music on the radio, doing what I was told to do because there was country music on the CBS network and I was told to go and hit the network – whatever was on – and it was country music and Mr. Holder fired me the next Monday. (Laughs) And it wasn’t really my fault, but he said there was going to be a new station go on the air up in Commerce and he knew the owners and he would call them, so it’s the nicest anybody was ever fired. He fired me and got me a new job at the same time.

And interestingly enough, WGAU is now WNGC and is all country.

Well that’s…I…I…I…believe me, in later years Mr. Holder heard from me many times…

Did you…?

(Talking at the same time) That we…

You rubbed it in.

Oh, yeah. Big time. But he was such a wonderful man. He laughed about it as hard as I did.